Personalized ads
Personalized advertising, custom advertising or targeted advertising is a form to provide certain ads to the user, based on the data gathered of them. This allows to target the user with ads of products or services of the user's preferences.
How it works
Some products or services offer personalized ads via ad providers, like Google Ads. In order to provide personalized ads to an user, data of them (and maybe their consent) is required. Some examples of data collected to provide personalized ads are: GPS location, age, gender, search history, ad interaction and application interactions. These gathered data allow the ad providers to show the user ads that better fit with the possible user's needs or preferences. Some products or services allow the users to disable or delete the gathered data used to show personalized ads.
Why it is a problem
Privacy concerns
The gathered data might belong to extremely sensitive data that could be gathered without the user's consent or notice. In the most invasive cases, the data gathered could belong to records from private conversations of the user. There's also a risk this data can be intercepted, taken, leaked or used for malicious purposes.
Manipulation
Personalized ads can be used as a more effective way to encourage the user to pay for a product or a service, even if they actually don't need it. It is possible the ads shown might be malicious, misleading or false ads, and the user could fall into them.
Examples
- Google Ads, the largest ad provider in the world, collects data from the products and services that the user uses. Then it shows personalized ads in their own products, services or third-party media that uses their ad provider service.
- Some products and services by Google that provide personalized ads are: YouTube, Google Search and Google Play Store
- Reddit shows sometimes personalized ads that look like a regular post, based on the post and community interactions in the application.
- Several mobile applications show a pop-up that asks the user to enable personalized ads. Others might force to only allow this feature in order to use the app.